This article series is among hundreds in alternative media that explain, document, and prove that the United States continuously engage in the viciously destructive policies of a rogue state, with a required and obvious citizen response to call for arrests of those .01% leaders of these crimes centering in war, money, and corporate media lies. The eleven parts of this series are also from my paper on teaching critical thinking skills to high school students in classes of US History, Government, and Economics.

The CIA had several covert wars; perhaps most important in today’s context of war on Iran: “Operation Ajax” that overthrew Iran’s democracy and installed a US-friendly and brutal dictator. When that dictator was overthrown and Iran refused another, the US aided Iraq to unlawfully invade and attack Iran from 1980-1988; killing up to a million Iranians. If the US lied and acted twice to unlawfully overthrew Iran’s democracy within many of our own lifetimes, shouldn’t we assume first another lie-started unlawful war today?

The two “reasons” for war with Iran are as false as the “reasons” for war with Iraq: Iran never threatened Israel, and Iran’s nuclear energy and medicine programs are IAEA-verified as completely safe and lawful.

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American families lied into WW1 under zero national security risk to expand Empires (6 of 11)

In the century we were all born into, the US unconstitutionally crushed lawful 1st Amendment dissent from US war in Europe in WW1 through the Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918. Let’s look at the “reason” given the US public to embrace war in the “current event” known at the time as the “Great War,” and now as World War One.

This war is closer to you than you may see. I don’t know your family, but I know mine: both of my grandfathers were lied-into engaging in this war on the American side. My mother’s father was an engineer working on trains’ pneumatic braking systems in Paris. He spoke fondly of rich food and French women to my two brothers and me; he also said he heard the darkest stories from those in the trenches. My father’s father died when I was very young, but my dad told us he believed his father fought in the trenches. Whenever the topic came up, my dad said his father would reply in the most serious and steely emotion: “I don’t tell war stories.” Perhaps the heart attack that ended his life is connected to whatever affected his heart during World War 1.

What connection to your family is WW1?

At the start of this war, the British were intercepting telegram communications, including spying on the US government. Among their interceptions was a message from German Foreign Secretary Zimmermann to Germany’s Mexican ambassador, advising that Germany would resume submarine attack of all trading ships approaching Great Britain, their enemy in war, beginning in February 1917. Germany would attempt to keep the US “neutral” in the war with the argument that American shipping companies were not trading with Germany because the British Navy prevented them, and that in wartime American shipping companies also must not trade with Britain. If that failed and the US declared war against Germany, Germany’s ambassador was to ask Mexico to join Germany in the war by attacking the US. Germany would promise money and regained territory they lost in 1848. The Mexican government quickly evaluated that an armed invasion by Mexico of the US was a completely unrealistic military goal that would end in certain defeat, and that Germany’s offer was a ruse for American military to occupy itself by killing Mexicans rather than fighting Germany.

Mexico declined Germany’s offer.

After British government revealed the message to the American government (but not the fact they also spied on all American communications), the US government used this as a reason for war and declared it against Germany and her allies on April 6, 1917.

Let’s apply critical thinking to the facts of the German offer and the American response for war.

Please recall the revealing lack of such thinking in the history you read on this topic.

The Zimmermann telegram’s offer was only active if the US declared war on Germany first, and Mexico rejected the offer. The German submarines were not attacking US territory, only private ships that chose to do business with Britain in a declared war zone, one that was already enforced by the British to prevent trade with Germany. If merchants from any nation wanted to avoid the risk of being attacked by a German submarine, that was as easy as staying away from Great Britain.

Therefore, there was no national security threat from Germany to the US. The actual threat, if any, was from British spying on secret US communications. There is also compelling analysis that the story we have about the Zimmermann telegram covers-up actions by British and American actors working for the goal of American entry on the British side for WW1.

US political leadership didn’t present those facts, but instead promised a “war to end all wars,” and “a war to make the world safe for democracy.” The US declared war and a national draft.

These were the lies told to both my grandfathers. This war, therefore, is personal to my family, and almost all American families, including yours.

US government made war opposition illegal, despite crystal-clear language in the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution to “make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” The US government arrested and indicted Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, for this speech that questioned US motivation for war (4-minute video reading and full text):

“Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war… The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another’s throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives….

Yours is not to reason why;

Yours is but to do and die.

That is their motto and we object.”

In the trial of Eugene Debs, the transcript of the speech was the evidence against him. The judge read the text of the Sedition Act and instructed the jury to respect the law. Mr. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for his speech; two minutes here:

Over 100,000 Americans were killed in WW1, in just over a year of combat. At the war’s conclusion, the British and French empires stole and divided between them Germany’s colonies; making the world safe for expanded British and French empire rather than “making the world safe for democracy.” And as we know, the promise to “end all wars” was empty rhetoric.

So: anyone who may have attempted to present the facts to my two grandfathers would be thrown into prison, and the US rogue state used my family’s taxes and military service to enrich the winning side’s empire while reneging on all bullshit promises to lure Americans into war.

We must ask again: did a US president with complicity of a majority in Congress lie their way into another war, this time violating the US Constitution to silence political dissent?

Beginning with the invasion of Mexico in 1846, do we see a pattern of US wars to violate treaties, violate the US Constitution, and then lie to have wars of choice?

There is evidence that US government engaged is similar deception to declare war in WW2. This burden of proof is more complicated than showing the US had no national security threat for WW1, and I have not invested the time to research it sufficiently to have confidence in its comprehensive facts. Relevant facts include that US Naval Intelligence issued the McCollum Memo a year before US entry into war in 1941. This plan was endorsed by two of President Roosevelt’s closest military advisors, and outlined eight actions the US could take to provoke Japan to attack the US. We know that all eight steps were implemented within a year, and that Japanese testimony agreed that those acts provoked their decision to attack the US. The memo was classified as “sensitive” to US national security and only declassified in 1994 after a Freedom of Information Request.

This is an example of the work historians and citizens have to engage in for factual discovery. It’s also a good example of my honestly reporting the existence of interesting and potentially game-changing material, and the limitation of personal academic investment for comprehensive factual accuracy regarding complex history.

But we do know this: because US officials lied in so many wars, their testimony MUST be rejected as reliable with anything said about WW2. My family’s sacrifices in that war:

My father-in-law was a US combat field medic, and shot on seven different occasions by German military. The last was being machine-gunned through both legs with seven bullets. His crippling injuries made it difficult to walk, and severely shortened his life.

My only uncle was an officer in the European theater. His hair turned white shortly after the war, and he was affected by PTSD. When my brothers and I asked him what he experienced in WW2, he turned deadly-serious: “Boys, you don’t want to know. And, I don’t want to tell you.”

My father was a few years younger, and was trained to drive tanks. His unit wasn’t called, but some of his high school friends were killed when their units were called for the Battle of the Bulge.

Carl Herman is a National Board Certified Teacher of US Government, Economics, and History; also credentialed in Mathematics. He worked with both US political parties over 18 years and two UN Summits with the citizen’s lobby, RESULTS, for US domestic and foreign policy to end poverty. He can be reached at Carl_Herman@post.harvard.edu

Note:Examiner.com has blocked public access to my articles on their site (and from other whistleblowers), so some links in my previous work are blocked. If you’d like to search for those articles other sites may have republished, use words from the article title within the blocked link. Or, go tohttp://archive.org/web/, paste the expired link into the box, click “Browse history,” then click onto the screenshots of that page for each time it was screen-shot and uploaded to webarchive. I’ll update as “hobby time” allows; including my earliest work from 2009 to 2011 (blocked author pages: here, here).

Glad to see you quoting Plain Speaking in your epigraph. It’s a great book and important reading for Americans interested in what the **** happened to our country. And yes, World War One was a crucial watershed in the slide toward the imperial police state. Peterson’s Propaganda For War (Oklahoma University Press, 1939) is an excellent indictment. Wall Street made a tremendous killing. The Du Ponts alone made enough selling gunpowder to the “Allies” to buy General Motors. George Bush’s great-grandfather, a steel-company president, became an important member of the War Industries Board, starting that family’s career of devastation. It was a seminal time, all around — sowing the seeds of death for American democracy.

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